Home and cyberspace - November 1998

Here's our lineup for this issue on 'Net-connecting families:

As we prepare to dig into recipe files, pull out decorations, and burn up the phone wires planning family gatherings, it might be fun to consider something completely different - for planning holiday get-togethers or for getting together online any old time. You might call them virtual family connection points. For some far-flung families, e-mail is what keeps it all together. For others it's their own Web site. The latest opportunity is a Web-based hybrid of the two, with added features. It's a permanent, on-demand family reunion plus collaborative family newsletter - free, private, and accessible in a Web site. A number of these sites have "opened up shop" this year. And Excite, one of those search engine-cum-"portals" trying to compete with AOL, started a similar service for families late last summer (see a Reuters item in Wired News for details).

This month we bring you a taste of both "old" and new ways families are using the 'Net to stay in touch. You'll hear from several of the smaller, newer companies who specialize in online families. And you'll find interviews with two families who use e-mail and the Web to keep tabs on each other across continents and oceans.

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Good, ol' e-mail
E-mail has become an essential tool for Ted and Marge Simon, who live in West Hartford, CT. Ted grew up in Brazil, Marge in the US. They have family in at least four countries (maybe more, but that's as far as we got in an hour-long interview). To them, using e-mail to stay in touch with children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, and friends spells convenience and economy. For Ted, a former ham radio operator, e-mail was a logical, much more convenient next step. But now that there's a connected computer in the house Marge is the technophile (she should be proud - see our Meaty Links below for two fun articles on e-mail and family tech support). We'll let Marge and Ted tell you their story:

When we asked Ted where everybody lives, he told us: "We have family in Norway, Brazil, Angola, New Mexico, and of course here in Connecticut also. That's the immediate family. Marge has cousins in California, Maryland, New York, and North Carolina."

So what does he think of e-mail? "Telephone is limiting, but e-mail is so liberating and fantastic that, I mean, it beats writing letters!" But there are drawbacks, he adds. "I'm 76. We try to stay on top of the news, but the new technology and all the new information that comes out with such incredible frequency makes it very, very hard to keep on top of it. It's almost overwhelming." But less so to Marge, he says. "Marge is definitely the driving force. Some of the technobabble is completely meaningless to me. She reads the instructions and the books. If we had kids in the house, I'm sure it'd be the kids."

How, we asked, did you all get started with e-mail?

Marge: "It's just sort of bloomed gradually."
Ted: "We've been online with our children for a long time. It all started because many years ago I was a ham radio buff, and I communicated with a friend in Brazil that way. But it was very cumbersome. He suggested we communicate via e-mail six or seven years ago."
Marge: "We started out with CompuServe. I was looking for an online service when we came back from Brazil. We took a long trip there after Ted's retirement. The friend doing ham radio in Brazil told us about the Internet. So when we came home, I knew someone who was using CompuServe, and she told me it was easy to learn to use. Then Anita [their daughter, who had married a Norwegian] got online in Norway and Tom [their son] in New Mexico, and our grandchildren are online. Now we have a grandson in the Norwegian Army and he's in the Arctic Circle. He has a HotMail address [browser-based e-mail]. And Anita's now working for Save the Children Norway in Luanda, Angola."
Ted: "My brother in Brazil has been online for two to three years, and his children have all come online in the past six months. My sister [also in Brazil] still uses fax, but her children have been on e-mail for a while."

We asked how it works for them.

Ted: "I'm on e-mail with somebody every night."
Marge: "But not with everybody - especially Anita. She's working in one of the villages in Angola where there's no e-mail access. So she has to go back to Luanda to get her e-mail - maybe once a month or so. But we think they're evacuating the village she's in, so she's going to be in Luanda permanently, I think. But mainly, the amount of e-mail all depends on what's going on. When Anita was coming to visit, we e-mailed back and forth all the time, planning the trip and what we were all going to do."
Ted: "We also don't have an awful lot of time - we're not e-mail slap-happy or anything. We have other things to do."

We asked them how many e-mail messages they get a day, on average.

Ted: "No more than a half dozen, three to four for the most part, on average…. When we get a message from Anita, if she doesn't copy the rest of the family, I immediately forward it to our sons in New Mexico and Connecticut, and maybe my family in Brazil, so everybody's posted. My sister-in-law is blind and we just got an email from her!"
Marge: "Our grandson was just bar mitzvahed, and a cousin was there and she was talking about a family chat room. She was very gung ho. I don't know. But it makes sense to people who are separated like we are around the world."

Any lessons learned, or tips for other families?

Ted: "I think in order to be fair to everybody on the 'Net you really have to organize your thoughts before sending your message. There's such a thing as polluting the airwaves. Long messages are anathema. I learned that from ham radio."

Marge also uses e-mail and the Web to pursue her interest in genealogy. For other genealogists, she volunteered that Ancestry.com didn't go as in-depth as she'd like, at least not into her own roots. "We're Jewish, and there's a huge site - JewishGen.org - that has a lot of great information, chat groups for people who are interested in different areas in the Middle East and eastern Europe, a conversion table for Hebrew dates - all kinds of good things."

The view from Down Under
When you're on the other side of the International Dateline from your family, communication is a serious scheduling challenge. That's the biggest reason why the Porter family relies on e-mail so much. They had other reasons for creating their family Web site. Here's the story from Robyn Porter:

"Let me start by introducing our family. My husband Mark works for Western Union International, and I am a stay-at-home mom. We have 3 sons, ages 11, 8, and 5, and another son due to arrive in early December. Western Union has transferred our family several times within the United States, but last spring they gave us the wonderful opportunity to relocate to Australia for a three-year assignment. We have been living in Gordon, a suburb of Sydney, for just over six months now.

"Moving as often as we have has made it a challenge to keep in touch with our extended families and friends. In the States, we got by with letters, phone calls, and occasional visits. Moving Down Under, however, presented new problems. Not only is it more expensive to phone, but there is a 16-18-hour time difference. (For example: When it's 5 pm on Sunday in Colorado, it's 11 am Monday morning here in Sydney.) Regular mail is also more expensive and takes eight or more days for a letter to arrive. We turned to e-mail to help us get over these hurdles. It has been wonderful! We can keep in touch with our friends and family members who are online, no matter what time of day it is or where they live…. Both parties 'talk' at their own convenience (and in their own time zone!)…. and you can send quick notes, little snatches of your life, and not have to worry about composing a complete letter or running to the Post Office. Having e-mail has been especially nice for me. Since I don't work outside of the home or have coworkers to interact with, it is a real highlight of my day to log on and check my mail, and 'talk' to my friends. I check the mail at least once a day! I feel it has helped me adjust and settle in here with fewer feelings of loneliness and isolation than I would otherwise have experienced."

We asked her when they decided to do a Web site, and why: "When we found out we would be moving to Australia, we started searching the Web for sites about other Americans living Down Under. We had so many questions about how our life would be different, what we needed to take with us, what we wouldn't be allowed to take, how to enroll our children in school, etc. We didn't find very many sites that were useful, and we started thinking that maybe we should do a Web site for other people who were in our situation. We also wanted to share the fun experiences we were having with our families.

"To begin our Web site, Mark purchased a book called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating an HTML 4 Web Page, by Paul McFedries. It is a great resource for those people who want to learn the basics of HTML; however, since then we've heard about other sites and resources that are much easier for beginners. Creating the Web site wasn't that difficult. The hard part is finding the time to maintain it. When we started, we had rather grandiose visions of all the things we would put on our site, and we were excited and willing to devote a lot of our time to it. And that's what a good Web site requires: time. Unfortunately, our excitement and enthusiasm has worn off, and we haven't spent the time with the site that we had envisioned in the beginning. Our Web site is still under construction!

"The Web site is fun, and we have had positive feedback about it, but we don't use it to communicate with our families. It's more of a novelty, a fun thing just for ourselves. E-mail, however, has become indispensable for us."

We asked Robyn if they have any tips for other families thinking about creating Web sites. "Talk to everyone you know about setting up a Web page! There is so much information available, on the Web itself and in other places, that it's impossible to find and absorb it all. By asking others about their experiences and what they have found that is useful, you will save yourself a lot of wasted time and energy. The other advice we might give is to decide first of all what you want your Web site to do, what its purpose is. Make a plan, or at least have a clear idea of what you want to do, and try to keep it simple. There are so many different things to do, and different ways to do them, that it's easy to overwhelm yourself and get burned out. Try to start small, and have fun!"

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A subscriber writes
And Carol Morrison sent us a brief comment about family communications both low- and high-tech:

"I've never been so up-to-date with the doings of my out-of-town relatives. It's so easy to send a few e-mail lines. In addition (if you're talking about computers and not just the Internet), there's lots more desktop publishing - newsletters, of course, but also things like name-tags, flyers, labels - all so much easier than they once were. I feel ancient because I STILL REMEMBER CARBON PAPER!!"

[For some information about newsletters of a slightly more conventional sort (but using 'Net distribution as well), see our "Meaty Links" below.]

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No HTML required!
A new phenomenon has appeared on the Web scene this year, touched on in our introduction. The best description we've heard so far is "private family collaboration spaces on the Web." With these services, families have private live chat, discussion boards, family calendars, links lists, and collaborative newsletters - free of charge. There are lots of ways to think of them. Families could see them as the above-mentioned ongoing, ever-accessible family reunions or as family newsletters everybody writes, as the news happens. Bridal couples could use them to keep bridesmaids, ushers, and relatives constantly up-to-date during the frenzied final weeks (see The Knot for a bridal site showing signs of this). Businesspeople would see these as free family intranets or "Lotus Notes" for the non-businessperson.

It's an intuitive thing: It was only a matter of time, it seems, before business folk realized that, with the Web, there's no reason why families can't have all the collaboration and communication possibilities of a corporate intranet. Two of the businesspeople we spoke with this month had just that epiphany - they saw how great the online tools they used every day at work would be for their own families and friends. It's so intuitive, in fact, that a whole passel of providers of these family spaces popped onto the Web scene all at once this year. And "the big guys" - those former search-engine, now "portal" sites like Snap, Excite, and Infoseek who are trying to be "all things to all people" - are offering similar services.

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An analyst's view
We asked Patrick Keane, a senior analyst at Jupiter Communications who watches these sorts of developments, for his perspective. "What you're seeing happening increasingly is, a lot of search and directory players like Excite and Yahoo! are implementing closed communities for everything from stock groups and families to the small-business community," Patrick said. "They've moved beyond the first-generation community tools like free home pages and free chat and are now providing all of these features the niche sites are offering…. As we move forward," he added, "the larger portals will be trying to build ancillary destinations themselves."

We asked him if he thinks that would make it tough for the sites focused on, say, families - FamilyPoint, MyFamily.com, Family Shoebox, etc. "It's an issue of whether the [niche sites] are going to be able to offer unique and original content that the Yahoo!s won't have. The big guys could be so large and amorphous that people won't find what they're looking for. MyFamily is a great brand, and if people can hang their hat on that, the Yahoo!s will eventually have a problem." Our own thinking on this can be found in our editorial section below, "What We've Learned."

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Three family sites: a panel discussion

Family Shoebox and FamilyPoint were the first ones out of the gate last spring. The newest player, MyFamily.com, is now in beta and officially opening this month. There are a lot of similarities in what the three services offer, but there are also some interesting differences….

Similarities:

Features include family favorites (links out on the Web, recipes, movies, books, etc.), news, family event/holiday calendars, chat, discussion boards, family photo album, intra-family e-mail, etc. All three services are free.

Differences:

MyFamily.com and FamilyPoint, the first venture-capital-backed service of this kind, are going for volume, bringing in ad and sponsorship revenue. FamilyPoint will be offering news and other resources for online families. "Latecomer" MyFamily.com has the advantage of building on and leveraging the huge traffic of Ancestry.com, its big brother, a popular site in the genealogy space. MyFamily.com has big plans for a Web store, which they say will be their primary revenue source. Family Shoebox will have a smaller-scale store selling books that "help make experiences on the Internet better for families," but revenue is not its parent company's main goal for the Shoebox. Access to the consumer, or end-user, is the goal for this company, Koz, Inc., whose bread 'n' butter is its group-publishing software, or "orgware," called Community Publishing Service. Koz's customers include Denver's high schools, which use CPS to publish their Web sites, the San Bernadino, CA, school district, and the entire state of Maine.

We spoke with executives at all three companies to hear their own words on this new opportunity for families and where their businesses fit into the picture. Here they are, our "panelists" for this discussion:

First question, gentlemen: What's your vision for the service you provide families?

Joe: "Our vision is to use the power of the Internet and make it relevant to all levels of users, and to allow families to stay closer together. I was working for a major technology company, and I knew of Lotus Notes and other kids of collaborative software. I wanted to take ubiquitousness of the Internet and allow my own family to take advantage of those features. I thought, 'my grandmother or uncle will never figure this out,' so it had to be really easy and fun to use. I wanted to take the service to the point where it could be a family-centric private place that gives all the members of the family the ability to contribute. Our motivation was to empower all levels of users."

Doug: "As technology changes, it'll be more and more important to have watering holes. People are more and more separated, so we'll need ways for people to connect. The United Kingdom and Israel are our biggest secondary countries [from which families are coming to the Family Shoebox "watering hole"]…. We see Family Shoebox as families' food, bread, and water. It's their shelter, and it's all theirs, a private space. A participating family can be very large - having 40 or more members - and it can grow and have multiple levels of relationships. Families are a living thing; they're not about the past. The genealogy sites out there are so focused on the past, their technology can be very flat. With living families [communicating in a space on the Web], a service has to be flexible, able to move forward."

Dan: "Technology has tended to actually break families apart or cause them to spend less time with each other over the past several decades. It's nice to think there are technologies coming now which keep families together which are spread out around the world. We don't otherwise have good ways to stay in touch and share information the way we did a half century ago, when all the family members were in one place. The Internet allows families to share information in a private way, the way they would in a physical reunion they might have together. It also provides a means of archiving important family information, such as address and historical information, or discussions of topics important to the family which members can access any time they'd like…. Many families have someone who actually does a newsletter - it's quite a big job each year to do that. This makes it simple for everyone to participate…. [We asked him if he thought interest would grow….] There will be millions of families doing this. You don't have to explain this very long before the lightbulb goes on."

What features does your service offer?

Joe: "We have a private family calendar, a photo gallery, live chat, Family Favorites (people put up poems, recipes, stories, their Christmas wish lists, links to their favorite Web sites), Discussion by Topic (a bulletin board), and e-mail to family members (for example, you can click on a checkbox next to your cousin's name and send a message just to him or her). We also have child safety controls that allow a designated adult to make sure everything in the family's area is safe for kids (or links to safe places). And we're building a family news section, where we'll be putting editorial content provided by partners."

Doug: "Because families are living, growing things, technology for them has to be able to move forward - to focus on how a real group works. We basically have a very flexible software product [Community Publishing Software, which Doug helped write] that the Shoebox sits on top of. It enables families to do a home page, a newsletter, have a message board, private chat, a participants list for e-mail to individuals or everybody, add more sections (such as a photo album)…. Some sections can be private, some public - you can turn it on and off [the privacy "switch"] whenever you want. You can have multiple administrators doing different sections, just as with a real group where people have many different roles. If you know HTML, you can use it, but you don't have to. We have a system that allows families to upload [to their space] Word documents, PDF files, animations - it can handle all those things."

Dan: "MyFamily.com provides for private family intranets hosted on our servers, free of charge…. Family Shoebox and FamilyPoint have similar features, and they've done a relatively good job of implementing those features, but we'll be implementing far more and iterating them more quickly because we're larger. Each family site will be able to build a collaborative family tree - which links back into our Ancestry.com expertise; it's one of the most requested features by families…. There are a number of features we'll be launching in the future. We currently have a review area, where family members can post reviews of books, CDs, videos, recipes, Web sites - their favorites, essentially. My favorite feature is the family album, where you can upload video and audio clips with your own descriptions. It's amazing when grandparents' first experience of a new grandchild is over the Internet - they can see him or her the very day it happens. Or people can have video clips of kids opening presents their grandparents sent for Christmas…. We're providing offline solutions to keep non-connected members from feeling left out - a feature not launched yet [we asked him to describe it, but he said he couldn't for competitive reasons]. Also, families give lots of gifts to each other. So we'll have a gift shop providing all kinds of items families give - electronics, software, flowers, jewelry. We've put together affiliate relationships with American Greetings, CDNow, Barnes and Noble, eToys, as well as a major supplier of gift products we'll announce in mid-November [when they officially launch]."

What kind of traffic are you getting or (in the case of MyFamily.com) do you expect?

Joe: "We basically generate 1,000s of new users a day - 2.3 million pageviews a month, or more than 400,000 unique visitors a month. Sixty percent are female. We have also found that 80% of our users are between the ages of 20 and 60 - a nice chunk of America there - and 14% of our visitors come from addresses outside the US."

Doug: "The Shoebox has 1,600 family sites and 5,000 users right now. Thirty percent of our population is overseas and use the Shoebox to communicate around the world. There should be very few families and a lot of members spread out all over the place. That's the ideal. We're totally focused on the idea of group publishing - allowing real organizations and real people to have access to the 'Net to publish together."

Dan: "Our beta site is up now, and we have several thousand people using it right now. We launch officially November 15. Ancestry.com is the most successful family-history Web site today, with over 1 million visitors per month."

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Meaty Links
In our panel discussion above, we tried to stay dutifully reportorial, saving opinions for the editorial section down here. So here are some thoughts on the key players we heard from above, as well as their competitors. And we've added some other resource links for connected families.

FamilyPoint - FamilyPoint was one of the pioneers in this space, and the features it offers - family calendar, chat, favorites, album, bulletin board, etc. - are either very intuitive, or widely copied! We think the look of the site - its interface - is one of the most attractive and well-thought-through, which makes it nice for families to come back to again and again. The creators of FP's software, WorldLinks, also in New York, say the challenge FamilyPoint offered them was "creating a scalable system that is capable of handling huge numbers of users, and dealing with extensive amounts of data that users enter into the system." Always interesting to hear what the challenge was when we've seen the solution!

Family Shoebox - The difference between Family Shoebox and its main competitors, MyFamily.com and FamilyPoint.com, is that "the Shoebox," as Doug calls it, is basically making the collaborative-publishing "orgware" (which Doug wrote for very large organizations) available to families. And it gives Doug's company, Koz, Inc., which works mostly in the business-to-business/government arena, access to the end-user (families!). The services aren't all that different from the Shoebox's competitors', but the company's marketing approach is: "guerrilla marketing" all the way, as Doug puts it - marketing that's pretty much word-of-mouth. We think the Shoebox's Joe and Jane Koz, the site's fictional-but-virtually-very-real Webmasters, are very smart guerrilla-marketing tools. "People are very fond of them," Doug said, as if he were talking about real people. They respond to people's e-mail individually, Jane during the day, Joe at night. They talk about each other." We asked Doug to describe them. "Jane's the smart one. She handles all the technical aspects of the site. She's warm, a redhead. She's a power-'90s kind of woman. Joe's the slacker 19-year-old type. Joe gets blamed for anything that goes wrong in the site. She works days, he works nights." We asked Doug if they're husband and wife. "Definitely not." Brother and sister? "No one knows," Doug said, adding that it's one of those little background mysteries members try to solve every now and then. Doug said he and his partners have a great time moving the Kozes' story along. The upshot of all this? The Shoebox isn't just a business; it's fun. And fun is good business!

MyFamily.com - This is the latest service in this category - at this writing, actually still in beta. But these "latecomers" have a big advantage: being able to leverage both the technology and the huge traffic coming through their popular genealogy site, Ancestry.com. For example, soon MyFamily will also have one of Ancestry's most popular features, the collaborative family tree. Basically, this service will be a "living family" site with a little genealogy thrown in - a plus for their revenue stream because of the powerful mix of genealogy and the Internet. Also, compared to the more "warm 'n' fuzzy" feel of some of its competitors, the MyFamily site is very straightforward and text-oriented, probably an attractive alternative to some users. In this already crowded field, individual taste will be a factor.

FamilyBeat - Just went live late this past September. Here's an article in PC World about the three guys in Cincinnati who founded the company because they thought it made sense to give families the connectivity powers of the Lotus Notes software they used every day in their day jobs (two of them, anyway) at Procter & Gamble. FamilyBeat has virtually the same features as FamilyPoint and other competitors. A nice feature in the calendar is being able to view just a list of events specific to the family, rather than a whole month or year spread out in calendar format, each with just a few dates entered. (Hmmm.... AOL chief Steve Case learned marketing at P&G - maybe FamilyBeat will beat everybody else!)

Our Family Place - If your family wants its very own Web site without having to build it, this is the place to go. But, unlike others in this space, Our Family Place is not free! It's not automated like its competitors; it's semi-custom family-Web-site building (you'd have a URL like www.ourfamilyplace.com/yourfamilyname). So pricing is scaled according to the size of the site you want. They charge both up-front, for site development, and ongoing, for hosting. A "starter" site - home page + 3 subsequent pages and a total of four family photos - costs $99 (with a current special offer of $84). The top-of-the-line site costs $259, unless you go totally custom (in which case, you'll negotiate). Hosting, after the first month, starts at $8.50 a month. Another difference: This service isn't private - it does not put customers' sites behind a password. The sites are not promoted by Our Family Place, so they're not registered in search engines, but any family can register its own site. And even if your site's not registered, it can certainly be "stumbled upon" via most search sites. It'll be interesting to watch how Our Family Place does, with so many competitors offering either family-connecting Web services or personal home pages free of charge. In a way, it splits the difference: You get (for a fee) your own "real Web site" (unlike with FamilyPoint and its competitors - where communication, not customization, is the goal), but you don't have to learn HTML and build it (as with Talk City or GeoCities, offering free Web sites).

MemberSites.com - Brought to you by Interactive Toaster, Inc., it appears this service went live last spring, then announced last July that it was free to users (if it wasn't from the start). There are a lot of similar features here to those of FamilyBeat, FamilyPoint, and others. Each service's features just have slightly different functionality. It looks like MemberSites is also going after the small-business market - basically providing a free intranet for organizations of 5 to 500.

"Parental Advisory: Getting Dad Online" - a fun piece in Yahoo! Internet Life by screenwriter Bruce Feirstein. The subhead says it all: "The writer of two James Bond flicks takes on an assignment that would leave even 007 himself shaken: family tech support."

"Guess Who's Going Online" - another fun 'Net culture piece, this one in the New York Times last spring, about how Gen Xers feel about their parents getting wired - and how the generations use the 'Net differently (the Times requires users to register to access their Web material).

"Instant Messaging Software Is Hot" - A Christian Science Monitor piece that does a good job of describing "instant messaging," a tool that makes e-mail a little more like using the phone. It's basically text-based, real-time, private chat. After everybody in your family, circle of friends, or work group downloads the same software, it notifies you when someone in your group is online (or you can set up a time), then you can simply begin "chatting." The article includes links to sites that provide instant-messaging software free for the downloading (you do have to register for the software first).

Family News Online - This site is a high-quality avocation for its creators, John Cardiff and Robert Mutrie - not a business. We contacted John, who explained, "The Norfolk Genealogy Web site was established in February 1997 as an online resource for genealogists researching their Norfolk County (Ontario) roots online. Its 500-plus pages include exclusive transcriptions of local historical records and out-of-print local history books, news about research tools available for sale, biographies of local pioneers, etc." Genealogists reading this, take note: John added: "After years of exploring the genealogy software market, we have decided to promote a particular program [Family Origins], and will soon add support pages for that application. In my less than humble opinion, it is a wonderful program … at a great price ($29US)." John said that, because it's not readily available in Canada they plan to sell it at cost via the site (this is not a money-making endeavor). For newcomers to the subject, it offers some excellent examples of sites about family history and genealogy. For one such, see the Beam Family News.

Creating Family Newsletters - For those of you interested in offline as well as online family newsletter publishing, this small site offers a few thematic ideas that might get you started. It's provided by Newsletter Resources, newsletter consultants and purveyors of books on the subject.

Talk City's "Best Family Home Pages" - A fairly self-explanatory page, but we're not sure who decides on which ones are "best" (maybe it's a list of all the family pages!). It's organized into "streets": Library Drive, for those with an education orientation, Minivan Ave. (parenting, pets, shopping, women's issues (we're not sure why "women's issues" are so often lumped with mini-vans!), and other virtually tree-lined cyberavenues.

In GeoCities, entering "family pages" in the box on their search page yielded 2,356 results: samples galore of how families are using the Web in GeoCities's huge community of free personal home pages. Genealogy is the strongest thread through these sites (the Internet is clearly an intuitive way of finding and communicating with unknown distant relatives and people who know about family ancestry). But a lot of families are just having fun together creating - and publishing! - something that is an expression of them as a family.

Two very large, general sites (and good jumping-off points) for genealogy enthusiasts are Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker, the latter published by Broderbund Software, Inc. (makers of the software product Family Tree Maker). They offer family-finding tools (indexes and search engines), guides, courses, community, and collaborative family trees (software for filling out a tree together online. They both have e-stores selling genealogy software, books, CD-ROMs, forms and charts, magazines, and other items. Family Tree Maker also offers classified ads and free family home pages. Ancestry.com is a portal to more than 650 genealogical databases.

Yahoo!'s Genealogy page

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What we've learned
We've all enjoyed reading family newsletters. But they're hard work for Cousin Clementine or Uncle Ernie. Now everybody who has news can pitch in; collaborative newsletters seem fairer and more fun (everyone has ownership). For anyone not connected to the Internet, they can be printed out and mailed! And Gram and Pops no longer have to wait for developing and snail mail to see their first grandchild; the hospital photos can be uploaded the day the little dearie's born! It's easier now to experience, and support, one another's rites of passage - maybe almost as easy as it was when the family "tribe" was all in one hamlet.

Family collaboration spaces on the Web are not only a neat idea - they're an intuitive one. They simply represent the next stage in Internet evolution, it seems to us. Corporations saw all the opportunities presented by a global Internet - employees able to collaborate and communicate across vast distances. But they wanted privacy. So they got intranets and collaborative networking products like Lotus Notes. Next step: families doing the same.

We think our interviewees are right: In the past century, families - at least in the developed world - have gotten more and more spread out. We do need "watering holes," as Family Shoebox's Doug Patton put it. Since it's getting so hard for extended families to get together physically, we need virtual spaces that draw us together, safe havens where we can share the important things going on in our lives.

Of course, these family sites aren't for everybody - not yet, anyway. Though they're supremely easy to use, they're more for families who live in countries where phone and ISP charges are relatively low. For Ted and Marge's daughter in low-bandwidth Angola and possibly for their relatives in Brazil, frequenting the family Web space would be prohibitive, if not impossible. E-mail still rules for the Simons family (they should think about Instant Messaging, described in our Meaty Links, for a more phone-like e-mail experience). But for the Porters, who found that constructing a personal Web site requires a little more time and work than they'd bargained for, the family-collaboration sites would probably be more attractive. If the Porters do end up providing the kind of public-service "What It's Like to Move to Australia" site they couldn't find before they moved, then they chose the right option: one of those free-personal-home-page services like GeoCities or Talk City. And there's another option (Robyn did say learning HTML and other Web-site-building skills can be fairly daunting): low-cost family construction and hosting services like Our Family Place. You pick the level of customization you want to pay for. It's a "time is money" sort of situation.

As for the business side of things, our answer to both questions raised by analyst Patrick Keane is yes. Will the "little guys," these family sites, be able to offer unique and original content that the Yahoo!s won't have? How could they *not* do a better job of serving an audience they know better than Netscape ever could (for the simple reason that Net Center has to serve so many audiences)? And are these sites places where people can "hang their hats?" We think the Web is going the way of the print world (Elle Décor, Cooking Light, Cigar Aficionado, etc.) - of life itself, actually - with ever-increasing customization and narrowing niches. We all appreciate the convenience of one-stop shopping, but Wal-Mart isn't where most of us would choose to hang our hats!

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We'd love to hear what you think about anything written here. Does your family need a watering hole - or do you already have one? Tell us if these family sites make sense to you. Let us hear from you! Just e-mail us at feedback@sagefamily.com.

Next month: Toys in cyberspace. Whether for consumer research, purchasing, or interactive play, the Internet is a great resource for parents this time of year.

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